Hats off to Jonathan Eisen for hosting this activity on his blog. (I’ll keep mine on, thank you. It’s raining cats and dogs here right now). A couple of weeks ago I posted a discussion about two papers that challenged the ortholog conjecture. Briefly, both papers stated that orthologs may not be such great […]
The manuscripts I review invariably fall into four categories: 1. This is crap. (Rare). 2. This is terrific. (Even rarer). 3. This can be OK, but they really need to fix A, B & C. (fairly common). 4. If I only knew what they meant in point A, I could say whether they need to fix A, […]
The AFP/CAFA 2011 meeting was held on July 15 and July 16. Yes, it was a huge success, and I’m not just saying that beacuse I am one of the organizers. I will write up something more comprehensive soon; in the meantime, here are my tweets from the meeting. I am learning a lot about […]
I have recently been invited to Google+, (thanks Ruchira!) and as social timesucks go, it is quite enjoyable. Here are my first impressions about g+. In a nutshell: g+’s attempt at compartmentalized communication is laudable, but falls short of the mark. Mainly because, no social network can emulate the real-life way we communicate (or not) with […]
… because, um, I dunno. Just too nerdy I guess. Click here to send me one, if you are so inclined: http://is.gd/Ag43 Thanks! .
3quarksdaily are running their annual competition for best science blog entry. There are 87 really great blog posts competing there for the votes of 3QD readers. But who has the time to read through all of them? So let me make it easy for you: vote for me. This blog’s “Dead Salmon” blog post has […]
There are some interesting developments regarding the February outbreak of Legionelliosis which was traced to the Playboy mansion. Reminder: over 120 delegates of the DOMAINFest in Santa Monica, California came down with symptoms of a respiratory illness. The convention included a trip to the Playboy mansion, which later was suspected as the outbreak source. […]
Open Lab is a collection of the crème-de-la-crème of the science blog posts over each year. Meticulously edited, only the finest of posts make it. Out of nearly 900 submissions this year, 50 (plus six poems and one cartoon) were carefully selected. Truly an amazing achievement of Bora Zivkovic, and especially his co-editor this year, […]
The personal genomics company 23&me is hosting a poetry contest. The winner receives a free pass to the Personalized World Medicine Conference. Poems should include a bunch of keywords having to do with 23&me, personalized genomics and all that jazz. I’m no poet (and don’t you know it), so here is my Haiku non-entry: My genome was seq- […]
If you are a teacher / instructor in the broadest sense of the word and have used this blog in your instructional capacity, please take a couple of minutes to fill out this short survey below (Five questions only, short. Really! short!!) It is important for me to know the extent of BsB’s outreach and […]
This came in my inbox today: solicitation to submit manuscripts to a journal completely outside my area of interest and proficiency. My email client software had an interesting reaction to it: The next email in my inbox was this: OK, that’s taking things a bit too far. Random solicitation of editors (did I mention that was not […]
Since its publication, the paper about bacteria using arsenic instead of phosphorous has been criticized from several different angles. First for the media pre-publication stoking, which lead many journalists to speculate about microbes from Titan while the paper was still embargoed (titanic microbes?), when ultimately it was revealed that we are dealing with earthlings, although […]
I received this email today today. I especially appreciate the personal touch in the salutation. Dear Dr. [NAME] Currently, we are involved in organizing “International Conference and Exhibition on Proteomics & Bioinformatics” (Proteomics-2011), will be held during 6–8 June 2011 Hyderabad, India. The main theme of Proteomics-2011 is to “Promote foster & enhances (sic) research […]
Yes, it’s that time when we all get together in front of the screen to watch another beautiful game played by that fantastic team contributing to the Carnival of Evolution. This time hosted on the lovely green pitch of Byte Size Biology. So get your popcorn, sunflower-seeds, crisps or any other culturally-appropriate sports-watching food and…… […]
The 29th edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted here. There are quite a few good things in store: on parrot feathers and lizardfish eyes, on Darwin cartoons, on dogs, dancing and much more. You can still contribute. So if you are a blogger with a post on evolution, go to the blog […]
